


Caterpillar

by Ahsurika



Series: Their Lights Unnumbered [2]
Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Aaravos Week (The Dragon Prince), Big Bad, Dark Magic, Drama, Gen, Season 3 Finale, villain-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25132621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahsurika/pseuds/Ahsurika
Summary: In all his calculations, Aaravos had forgotten about her. He will never commit such an oversight again.
Series: Their Lights Unnumbered [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1820533
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Caterpillar

**Author's Note:**

> I'm splitting up the oneshots from my Aaravos week publish into their own fics, as I probably should've when I first published
> 
> this fic is a reconstruction of the final scene in S3 from Aaravos’s PoV. lots of bullshitting about magic contained herein

After a careful analysis of his status and the energy around him, Aaravos concludes that it will require three hours to extricate his familiar from the splattered ruin of the human king’s corpse.

It’s the skull that’s the problem. Eight thousand feet should have obliterated it on impact, thrown dewdrop-sized fragments of bone a hundred feet in every direction, the brain popping into an explosion of red-grey juices and mixing with clumps of hair.

Thanks to Aaravos, however, it’s still intact.

Relatively speaking.

A shame he has no nearby allies to follow up on this success. Even hastily executed, his shielding spell is an exercise in sorcerous mastery. Few mages have ever existed who could conceive of what Aaravos did in mere seconds: pulling every last scrap of ambient _vita tenebra_ into a protective netbind that sheathes the most vital parts of the human’s brain in myelinated semi-fluids, retaining enough conductivity to prevent the brain’s painfully insufficient Primal nodes from short-circuiting.

It’s not Lord Viren’s fault he was born human, but Aaravos once again finds himself wishing he could have found himself a proxy even _slightly_ more attuned to the currents of magical energy. Ah, the conundrums of trying to uplift their featherless race…

Of course, circumstances conspired to complicate the spell’s construction. When the Moonshadow girl tackled Viren and Aaravos’s familiar off the mountaintop the human king had dropped his staff, and the girl was not considerate enough to kick it off with them. It was probably still up there, leaking its impressive magic stores into the atmosphere, with the overwhelming majority of the _vita tenebra_ siphoned from the dragon infant almost certainly returning to the child.

Acquiring such power was Viren’s idea; Aaravos only needed the child dead, and appeasing the human king’s avarice means that neither of them got what they wanted. Still, for all that power to _bleed away_ …

If only the Moonshadow girl could have joined their descent for just a little longer. Aaravos knew from long experience that her people possessed some of the most densely packed and easily siphoned magic in all of Xadia. The Moon energy lying largely latent within her might have powered Aaravos’s netbind all by herself, and it would certainly be easier to deal with now, like parting moonlight.

But when the human boy — a whole other puzzle in his own right, that one — caught her, the complexity of the spell combined with the fortification necessary to survive over a mile and a half’s drop left Aaravos with only one option.

For the fall offered no other life forces that Aaravos could use — birds native to eastern Xadia had learned countless millennia ago to avoid the sky around Storm Spire, lest they become an easy snack for draconic royalty. The thin, dehydrated clouds encircling the mountain’s peak gave way all too quickly to clouds thick with sulfur-bonded rainwater, far too acidic from the battle’s fumes to support their usual millions-count of tiny bacterial life. With Aaravos’s own attunements restricted by the Dark Magic ambience of his familiar, he could not access the natural energies of the falling wind and rapidly-rising earth.

If killing something is the only way to preserve it, he won’t think twice. King Viren of Katolis died long before his body hit the ground.

Aaravos picks at the magical weave slowly and carefully, one lavender thread at a time. His spell was tightly knit and fortified into several firm layers; unraveling it from the inside is little easier than uprooting a massive oak by tugging at each individual leaf, and with much less room for error. Failure could snarl the threads or even warp the bind permanently, an outcome Aaravos is _not_ keen on. It might be decades yet before he would have another chance at freedom, and humanity may not have that much time left.

Not when they have child rulers submitting to a makeshift alliance with _elves_ to protect _dragons_ …

Aaravos pauses in his unraveling, holding several dozen threads in his “hand”. The shimmering violet cocoon has thinned enough that it is no longer opaque, revealing a curiously unfamiliar environment outside. Viren’s fall should have landed them both near the pitched battle at the foot of Storm Spire, but the blur beyond his cocoon is not the the billowing dark and filtered fireglow of a burning battlefield. Rather, it has the sub-light ambience of belowground: a damp cavern, likely, or some other sunless chamber.

Had someone moved Viren’s body? Is it a friend to the dead man, or a foe?

And most importantly to Aaravos, what does this person think of the ox-sized egg pulsing with the light of unearthly spellwork?

The threads in his “hand” quiver with tension; they vibrate like a clenched fist, music to Aaravos’s ears. Dark magic spells by definition do not resound with the candescence of starsong, but they possess an immediacy that Aaravos’s native Primal powers do not.

Such is the path of a true mage: acknowledging that every type of magic has its place in this world. Viren understood this, right up to the end.

Smiling fondly, Aaravos gestures his life essence to tug gently on the threads in his “hand”. Most of them come easily and drift like grass in the breeze, but one stubborn thread rebounds to its source, and Aaravos spares several extra seconds to massage it loose.

Necessary though it was, Viren’s death puts a very real snag into Aaravos’s larger strategy. Not because of what Viren’s loss means for the balance of power in the war to come, though the man was a learned and undeniably powerful mage (if stodgily simplistic in his approach to the art). Any ally with magical affinity, even a human relying on secondhand dark magic, is better than none — Aaravos will confess to arrogance, but he is not so prideful that he would reject aid from any corner.

No, Viren’s death creates a much more immediate problem: Aaravos has no more human agents.

Viren dead. The petty prince, dead, and Saleer, captured or fled. The combined Pentarch army crushed in the field, its Sun-infused soldiers killed or imprisoned or scattered. The remaining two functional monarchs victoriously aligned against Viren’s cause.

When one’s overarching purpose for Xadia begins with the salvation of humanity, a situation such this presents quite a hill of problems.

If only that boy from the mountain…but there is nothing to be gained from lamenting what could not have been known.

 _One mystery at a time_.

Still, Aaravos has not prepared all these decades just to be stymied by the failures of a barely-competent human monarch with a minor god complex. Let the new boy-king and his menagerie of misfits bask in their victory. Viren was a convenient lightning rod for their failures; none should suspect Aaravos’s presence, let alone his hand behind Viren's actions. Given enough time, he’ll —

A _massive_ surge of energy twangs every spellthread simultaneously. The sour discordance jolts Aaravos from his concentration and his phantom form stutters, his connection to the fortification spell bucking in his suddenly tenuous grip. His thoughts haze, a grey buzz dropping like a curtain on all his forms of sight.

Reeling, Aaravos lunges for the loose threads but at this distance with his true body so far away he's slow, too slow and anyway it's like trying to grasp lightning with fingers made of smoke, and the spell is whining, wavering --

— and then to Aaravos’s horror the whole construct _snaps_ away, the steady droning hum of the _vita tenebra_ rising, rising, _shattering_ into a reality-tearing screech.

Before he has time even to calculate the consequences of this catastrophe, however, another surge crashes into his spell, this time hurtling along the threads faster than sunlight. The explosive potential of the uncontrolled dark magic is snuffed out nearly as quickly, every last bit of energy sucked away by the surge's sudden recession.

By some belated instinct, born of a millennium's magical mastery, Aaravos realizes that the source of all this madness is Viren's body. But that makes no sense. He killed Viren, sucked every last drop of _vita tenebra_ from the man, and the spell --

A soundless _boom_ rolls through his mental haze like a black hole, warping everything in its path. For one dizzying instant, the elf cannot even remember his own name.

Then, as immediately as it appeared, the chaos ceases.

With slow phantom breaths, Aaravos takes a minute to master his worry.

Spellwork. By an _extraordinarily_ powerful Dark Mage.

It can't be the winged boy, but if not him, then...

Although Aaravos’s intricate spellweave remains nearly untouched, the _vita tenebra_ that powered it has all but vanished. Some stray particles linger, little purple mites popping from the threads to float around his familiar like dust. The fortified cocoon around now glows a steady green-white, the light from his own familiar's amniotic nourishment turning the shell opaque.

There's no reason to bother unweaving this spell now. With the destructive potential of the spell's latent energy gone, what should have taken several hours of meticulous and dutiful unraveling can be achieved in a few short, violent minutes. Now unconstrained, Aaravos pours the final touches into his familiar, utilizing the spell's own intricacy as sustenance.

When Aaravos cuts open his cocoon, the sight that greets him is the most pleasant shock he may have ever received.

A tall girl with an oval face kneels over Viren’s body. She wears dark apprentice robes woven with gold strands and embellished with raven-wing epaulets. Trembling hands hold the staff, that burning rod into which Aaravos had drained the Sun Nexus, in a death grip. The Dark Mage behind the energy surge. Viren’s daughter, Claudia.

In his calculations, Aaravos had forgotten about her. He will _never_ commit such an oversight again.

Because Viren is _alive_. He's sitting up, leaning against. Bruises on his body, cuts on his face, skin pale as death, but breathing, his eyes open. He may still have some broken bones, perhaps other lasting damage (to say nothing of the psychological), but it's an incredible restoration from the mangled mess he was. If anything, to Aaravos's Startouch vision, the man looks almost _healthier_ than he did before, some additional vital force returned to his skin and nerves.

It's not possible. Resurrection is a monumental feat, rarely attempted and only twice before accomplished in recorded magecraft.

And yet.

Aaravos believes he could perform it, if only there existed a being worth siphoning the world’s valuable fonts of _vita tenebra_ to restore, but for a human…and a _child_ , at that…for a human to even discover the forms, surely her forebears would not have been so foolish as to _write them down_ — shaping them correctly, when an error as marginal as the span between seconds could crater a mountain — all the while fighting to control the primal chaos of the Sun Nexus that her father stole, wresting it from the staff, molding nuclear fission like _clay_ —

The magnitude of the effort has turned half her hair shock-white, and her veins bulge beneath the vellum-thin skin of her arms, snaking down to her wrists like spilled ink. Her stare looks haunted, hungry; in Aaravos’s piercing stargaze, her dark irises swim with whispers of periwinkle silk. Aaravos can smell death on her, and not just her father’s, nor that of the three bodies in the corner. She’s given up more to bring her father back than she’s showing, and she will never regain it.

But the result is that she has pulled off a spell that should have been impossible for any of her kind. Little more than a child, as much a caterpillar as Aaravos’s familiar, yet this girl human may fly to even greater heights than Viren ever could.

No mere asset _indeed_.

In a rare and generous moment of surprise, Aaravos permits himself to acknowledge this miscalculation. First the boy, his vital currents overflowing with wind and lightning, wings sprouting from his arms as he hurtles toward certain death. Now this young woman, succeeding where some of the greatest elf sorcerors in history had died trying. Perhaps, in his haste to choose an agent with political authority, Aaravos has mistaken where the true power in humanity lies.

What is it that makes Viren’s daughter so strong? Why does her potential so outstrip her father’s? It cannot be that she knows more than he; Aaravos has felt the work of studious decades in Viren’s brain. She is volatile even for a Dark Mage, but that creativity can only take one so far when the mind is so…structured…

…unless…

_Hmm._

A thread worth pursuing, at a later time. For now, he will do his best to ensure this enigmatic girl survives long enough to aid him in the next steps of his ascension.

After that…well.

Conservation of energy may be stretched, sidestepped from time to time, but the truth is that a new world requires down payments. No matter how great it is, her power merely amplifies the sacrificial potential of Viren’s bloodline.

The two humans look up at him, apprehension curdling to fear in their expressions as Aaravos's fresh body drops to the cavern’s wet stone, his feet hitting with a rainfall-staccato of sharp clacks. They might as well be speaking their doubts aloud as they absorb his mass of legs, the breadth of his wings, the sheen of his smooth carapace.

Or rather, he can almost hear _Viren’s_ doubts.

The girl, on the other hand?

 _Oh, yes, you_ are _the one_.

Smiling as widely as his new face allows, Aaravos offers them a millipedal approximation of a bow.

“It relieves me to see you well, my friends.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments and critique are always appreciated!


End file.
